Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (615 page)

I don’t know how Mr. Pflugschmied knew that she had it.
 
And, going down to George through the chicken runs, Mr. Pflugschmied had imagined himself as conveying the glad news that he had just heard over the telephone. Marie Elizabeth, in Mr. Jeaffreson’s office in Lothbury, E.C., held sworn copies of the birth certificates of George Hijmann Marsden, 17-8-
90, in
the Island of Jersey, and of Marie Elizabeth Hijmann Marsden in the same place on the 25-11-92.

Mr. Pflugschmied had been too tired, though not too enthusiastic, to go to Jersey for those documents. They had just come by post to Mr. Jeaffreson’s city offices! For, a fortnight before, the fat Mr. Pflugschmied, labouring for his Marie Elizabeth whom he loved, had said to himself:

“The children must have been born in Jersey!”

How he had arrived at that conclusion, God alone knows. It was, as far as I know, just genius. Possibly he had reasoned it out; possibly he had just guessed. I daresay he had, at some time, come across American citizens who had gone to the Channel Islands from France to have their children born, so that the sons might escape French military service. There is in Paris a large colony of Americans, and I believe — indeed I know — that they do that pretty frequently.

At any rate, Mr. Pflugschmied may score it as an inspiration of pure genius. He had taken a great deal of trouble. So, expecting an outburst of gratitude, he was the more aroused when his brother-in-law-to-be turned from the red-haired scientist, and catching him, Mr. Pflugschmied, by the throat, cursed out:

“You swine!... You... You....”

Mr. Pflugschmied’s mind, attuned to the applause of kindly ladies, did not register those words.

And suddenly, George cursing him all the time in horrible, hardly comprehensible terms, a voice cried out in the inner consciousness of Mr, Pflugschmied:

“This man does not like to have his name in the papers. This man does not want to be an Earl!”

George Heimann threw him some feet away and shouted:

“Not
Kakodylate,
you swine...
Nitrate
!... You swine! You unspeakable swine...Now
I
shall have to write to the papers....”

To Mr. Pflugschmied the distinction between the two forms of chemical seemed trifling, and the necessity for writing to the papers agreeable. And there George stood, his chest working up and down as if he had run seven miles, his black hair dishevelled over his brow, his eyes seeming to be about to drop blood and his lowered hands working mechanically. Over the hedge the scientist, who had retreated to that safer position, and the policeman, regarded the boy with goggling eyes. Suddenly George swung round and with both his arms stretched over his head went down the hill with great mad leaps, without direction and apparently without purpose.

Mr. Pflugschmied ran up the hill and, panting dreadfully, stuttered out to Eleanor Jeaffreson:

“George has gone mad. We have been too hard on him!” Miss Jeaffreson was already in her walking costume. She, too, naturally, had the glad news of the arrival of the birth certificates at her brother’s office, and she imagined that Mr. Plowright, George, Herself, Marie Elizabeth, and Mr. Jeaffreson were going to make up a pleasant picnic party to the solicitors of the Marsden estate, to exhibit the documents and to receive acknowledgment of their claims.

I don’t know if they would really all have been allowed to go. At any rate, Marie Elizabeth had to go alone with Mr. Jeaffreson, Mr. Plowright waiting on that doorstep in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I believe the great surrender of the Marsden fortress took place with no pomp of any kind. Indeed, it must have been exactly as poor George had always wished. Mr. Lamplough — that was something like the solicitor’s name — sat amiably on one side of the table, Marie Elizabeth on a hard horsehair chair on the other, and Mr. Jeaffreson, a little ruffled but methodical, drew papers out of a pigskin wallet which he handed to Mr. Lamplough, who was a cheerful man of fifty. The papers looked very insignificant — so did Marie Elizabeth in her shabby widow’s weeds, which diminished her figure.

The solicitor looked over his glasses at her, and said:

“Your ladyship is very fortunate to have got this difficult business settled at such a time.” He looked at Mr. Jeaffreson, and said:

“The Earl himself is not here? I hope to congratulate him on another occasion.”

I heard from Mr. Plowright that it was no more impressive than that. I believe he was bitterly disappointed that cannon were not fired whilst he waited on that doorstep, ready to run as Pheidippides did from Marathon to some Central Press Bureau or other with the glad news that George’s earldom was no longer contested or contestable by anyone. It was no more than three then, so most of the evening papers had little faint stop-press announcements of the accession in some column or other.

It was probably a day of slight disappointments for Mr. Pflugschmied as Pressman. For, on the suggestion of Mr. Jeaffreson, Mr. Lamplough agreed that it would be very proper for his august firm to address to the morning papers a short letter stating that George and his sister had produced the necessary proofs of their origin and giving a few dignified particulars. And this cut the wind out of the sails of the much more flamboyant announcements that Mr. Pflugschmied had prepared, and Marie Elizabeth, whose nature changed very much as soon as her rights were quite formally acknowledged, persuaded him not to send any “ story” at all to the London papers. That seemed to him incomprehensible!

He told me, by-the-bye, that leave to presume the death of my brother, on my application nominally, had been given two days before — and that rather fixes the date in my mind as the middle of September, 1916, my brother having been missing almost exactly a year. And for some queer reason Marie Elizabeth had seen fit to buy herself cheap black weeds.

They were all, at that time, dreadfully hard up.

But, when I think of it, it grows more comprehensible — that sudden recognition of widowhood on that girl’s part. For it was as if, with the coming of assurance, all sorts of springs thawed in the frozen nature of that girl and all sorts of perceptions returned to her. I know that she even wrote to me, a few days later, a very touching and modest letter about my brother, whose kindnesses she had perceived as if through a veil and now saw very plainly. She certainly kept Mr. Pflugschmied waiting for several months. I did not, by-the-bye, get that letter until just the other day: I had taken pretty harsh precautions against receiving any letters at all. That was why, when I next met Mr. Pflugschmied, I did not know that the marriage had taken place.

She broke down, of course, very badly that evening, and that did not do much to smoothe the pillow of Mr. Pflugschmied during the next twenty-four hours. She had to be taken to an hotel, at the door of which, towards six in the evening, arrived a cab containing Eleanor Jeaffreson — and George, who looked like an image of wax. So that Mr. Pflugschmied, dreadfully frightened of his charge, had to take the young man down to Froghole, and there remain with him. I believe he had a dreadful night; for owing to their want of money my brother’s telephone had been cut off, and he had no means of knowing how Marie Elizabeth was progressing. Miss Jeaffreson, on the other hand, had such a debauch of complex-investigation as can have fallen to the fortune of few young women.

She had been with George nearly all day — and now there was Marie Elizabeth for a good part of the night!

As for George on that day....

I do not know how Miss Jeaffreson found him — by what art! For she went down the hill and came upon him as straight as if the needle of a compass had pointed her there. I daresay that George, running without purpose, had been influenced by the folds of that descending ground, and Eleanor, running purposefully enough, but without destination, had been influenced by the same folds. Or there may have been only one stile out of that particular chicken-field. Eleanor probably thought that the subliminal self of George was calling in agony to her own under-senses. I daresay it does not matter.

She found George on level ground, rushing backwards and forwards, like a mad sentry, between two old thorn trees about twenty feet one from the other. He went backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, swaying at the violent turns about, his hands in his trouser-pockets, his coat-tails flying. She caught him firmly by the right upper arm, for all the world like her brother with a client, and said:

“You must keep still or you will go mad!”

He looked at her like a man stricken with panic, and said: “I must write to the papers! By God, I must write to the papers!”

I daresay he had been breaking up pretty fast for some time before that, and that final necessity just drove him over the edge. It seems absurd to go mad because you must write to the papers; but then he had had a good deal of them. Do you know, positively, that field with the two thorn trees being a favourite resting place for London bean-feasters, the wind had blown and held against a thorn stem an old copy of an illustrated daily paper — or one sheet of it — and there, displayed to George’s sight, was a pallid, spotty portrait of Marie Elizabeth with some such subscription as: “
Astounding Claim, to Title
!”

The papers were much more polite to Marie Elizabeth than to George; after all, she was the wife or widow of an officer, and the law of libel is a very tricky thing. But they permitted themselves to be astounded when she appeared in court....

If Eleanor Jeaffreson had been a man, we should have had to call her a stout fellow, for, all unaided, she got George up to Town. I believe she followed him as he progressed by impulses of mental agony, over a gorse common and on to a great tarred main road. She kept on telling him whenever she was near enough to make him hear, that if he did not keep still he would go mad. I daresay it was a good thing to do. At any rate, after they had walked for a few minutes on the tarred road, he stood still, looked at her darkly, and said:

“I don’t want to go mad. I don’t even
want
to hang myself. I am being urged to it. It’s damnable to have to write to the papers!”

And as Eleanor had heard nothing of Mr. Plowright’s latest feat of inaccuracy, that alarmed her a good deal. It sounded like the gentlemen who suddenly discover that they are Emperors of China.

I believe that by then she had a genuine affection for George; she had lived for a long time beside his gentle and very courteous personality. And I daresay she even had a glimpse of what he must have suffered. Anyhow, she had conscience enough to see that this was now a case beyond any soul-fingering of her’s; she had not sense enough to tell him that by two that afternoon he would be the acknowledged Earl Marsden. That would have been too direct for her!

They stood silent beside that broad tarred road where it mounts a steep rise. She had just one desire: to get him up to Town and into the hands of a soul-straightener of sorts, a man in whom she had implicit confidence. There stood George beside the 26th milestone from London, hatless, in white canvas shoes, his tie hanging over his waistcoat. An Army Service Corps lorry mounted the rise. She ran four or five yards to meet it, and stood in the road, her arms outstretched crosswise. She told the driver that George was an ex-Guards private standing there, out of his mind, and she must get him to a doctor...

What that soul-straightener did to George I don’t know. I have as to these matters an absolutely open mind. George told Clarice that that fellow made the whole of his past life rush before him in a few seconds, like an adder going through heather on a hot day. I believe their method at that time was to say to a man very quickly the word “Father!” If instantaneously he answered “Kicks!” they knew that he had a brutal male progenitor. If he answered slowly “Lovely beard!” they knew that the father had been a handsome man as to the lower part of his face, but not violently interesting. Then they would go on to “Fire,”

“Mother,”

“Women,” and the rest of life. And so they evolved his story, digging up many secrets of the past. I daresay it was all right.

But George must have been a misleading patient: for when the soul-straightener said to him “Father!” he answered, without the pause of a fifth of a second, “Swine!” and the expert took it to mean that George’s father had behaved badly to him. It must have been a very false start, and confused the issues a good deal.

George, of course, was thinking of the pigs of the city of Zell that, rooting among the beechnuts, had moved his father’s feet, and so made the Official Swineherd observe the body, hanging from a beech bough twenty-seven feet high. I daresay it was those pigs really that saved George; or it may have been the policeman with a face like a ham. Or, of course, Clarice.